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August 18, 2022

The disappearing Windows DNS debug log

The Windows DNS debug log contains valuable information on DNS queries and activity that is especially useful for monitoring and analyzing malicious traffic. This requires some configuration changes for the DNS service in order to enable debug logging. Here is a short description on how to enable debug logging for the DNS service on windows, this also applies to Windows Server 2008 and later. It is possible to specify the file and path name of the DNS debug log file as well as the maximum size of the file.

August 10, 2022

NXLog in an industrial control security context

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have evolved over the years and now have a lot in common with traditional IT systems. Low-cost Ethernet and IP devices are replacing older, proprietary technology, which opens up new possibilities to improve connectivity and remote access. However, it also increases vulnerability to cyberattacks and incidents since the system is no longer segregated. Due to the nature of ICS, they differ from other IT systems. A compromised system can cause severe damage to the environment, incur substantial financial and production losses, and negatively impact an entire nation.

August 9, 2022

Raijin vs Elasticsearch

Log collection is most closely linked to enterprise security practices—for example, aggregation and analysis in a SIEM. However, collecting certain logs for reasons other than security is often valuable. It may even be a requirement of your organization for the purposes of auditing, legal compliance, or data retention. Storing all these logs in a database is the most efficient way to manage the data. Finding and managing logs stored as flat files or structured data can be challenging without a database.

August 3, 2022

Send email alerts from NXLog using Python, Perl, or Ruby

NXLog is a versatile log collector that easily integrates with other software, platforms, and programming languages. Out-of-the-box it supports integration with many third-party solutions through its input, output, and extension modules. Moreover, extending NXLog with custom functionality is as easy as writing an application or script in your favorite programming language and loading it from the configuration. Email notifications of events indicating potential security breaches or severe application errors are a standard procedure for IT admins and DevOps engineers.

August 1, 2022

The benefits of log aggregation

Logs are a record of the internal workings of a system. Nowadays, organizations can have hundreds and, more regularly, thousands of managed computers, servers, mobile devices, and applications; even refrigerators are generating logs in this Internet of Things era. The result is the production of terabytes of log data—event logs, network flow logs, and application logs, to name a few—that must be carefully sorted, analyzed, and stored. Without a log management tool, you would need to manually search through many directories of log files on each system to access and extract meaning from these millions of event logs.

June 28, 2022

Security logging on Windows - beyond 4625

As a security administrator, you may be inclined to focus on the Windows Security log within Windows Event Log. You might even go as far as filtering for specific event IDs, such as EventID 4625 (failed logon request), while forgetting there is much more to security logging on Windows than this single log source. The consequence of this narrow field of view is that you are not benefitting from the valuable information that other Event IDs used for security audit policies can offer.

June 1, 2022

How NXLog can help meet compliance mandates

Compliance mandates are frameworks that organizations must implement to meet industry regulations. Some of these mandates provide guidelines and best practices, while others may be tied to legislation. With the constant and rapid changes in technology, ensuring that your organization adheres to the relevant regulations is an ongoing process. So why should you comply? Simply put, not complying might cost you more than implementing processes to meet regulatory requirements. By not complying, you might be violating the law, and in case of a data breach, you may face litigation from affected parties.

May 30, 2022

Collecting kernel events with NXLog for analysis in the Elastic stack

It is known that measuring performance is one of the most challenging tasks in system administration. It requires proper configuration and a good understanding of the results. Fortunately, Linux systems offer a wide variety of tools for obtaining performance metrics. In this blog post, we will focus on the instrumentation capabilities of the Linux kernel and some interesting methods of analyzing the results. The importance of the kernel lies in the fact that usage information related to CPU, memory, disk space, or network interfaces is always passing through it, and it cannot be bypassed.

May 11, 2022

NXLog provides native support for Google Chronicle

We are delighted to announce that with the release of NXLog Enterprise Edition 5.5, NXLog provides native support for sending log data to the Google Chronicle threat intelligence platform. About Google Chronicle Google Chronicle is a cloud-native SIEM service provided on the Google Cloud Platform. It allows organizations to normalize, correlate, and analyze their logging data. Chronicle makes threat hunting easy by empowering security experts to investigate logs allowing them to take a holistic approach to threat detection.

March 19, 2022

Deploying and managing NXLog with Puppet

Puppet Bolt is an open-source orchestration tool that automates the manual configuration and management of your infrastructure. In this post, we will look at how you can create your Puppet Bolt project directory, your inventory YAML file, and finally, your Puppet Bolt Plan to deploy NXLog on a variety of Operating Systems. Why use Puppet Bolt to deploy NXLog? Apart from the usual tasks of updating software packages, configuring web servers and databases, the need for constant logging has become extremely important, and a de facto necessity nowadays.

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